We've been talking a lot about the victory that comes through standing. I think we've all echoed our thanks to God that, sometimes, all we have to do to beat Satan back is stay on our feet through the storms and the wind and the rain that he uses to bring us down. Sometimes, just doing that feels like doing the impossible.
On another note, I've been thinking some about the Bible verse from which we culled the "even if" part of this blog's title. The fact that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego went into the furnace knowing that God might not save them there still blows my mind. They knew they might die, choking and writhing.
In light of these thoughts, I'm sure you can all imagine my surprise when my pastor told us to turn to the book of Daniel for our sermon on Sunday night. "I've heard a lot about Daniel lately, " I thought. "I wonder what part he's going to teach on."
"Oh...that part. It figures."
You know how, sometimes, when God really wants you to get something, he repeats himself? And you say, "Yeah, God...I got it now," and he says, "No, I don't think you do." Well, that was the case here. My pastor spoke on the three men in the furnace, just like Kirsten's pastor did three weeks previously, in Bellingham.
As I listened to the story this time, the "even if" rolled over me without so much as a stir. Though it fascinated me before, that message wasn't for me that day. Instead, something else hit me.
Do you know how Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego overcame Satan?
They stood.
First, they stood when everyone else bowed down to the idol. In refusing this bow, they acknowledge God's rightful place. Satan found himself beaten there before he even started. I can see his fury in the king's choice of punishment for not bowing--death in that horridly hot furnace. "You think you can stand?" Satan says. "Try standing here."
And then, through the grace of God, they call his bluff and remain on their feet in the face of heat that killed their guards.
The king looks in the fire and sees them standing, walking and talking and having a grand old time. Someone is with them, one who is clearly not of this world and who is sustaining them when they should be overcome. He stays until they step out of the fire, by their side the whole time, helping them stand when they should fall.
When I look at this story through this lens, I see how clearly our victory comes in standing. Sometimes we do it for him and other times we do it with him, but the standing is the victory and indicates our victory to others looking on.
Keep standing, friends.
.JPG)
subscribe
Posts
Comments
about us
Wisdom. Faith. Grace. Becoming.
For different reasons, we're all in the crucible. We're walking through a season of intensive refinement, punctuated with celebrations and miracles. We wonder and ask, what is God doing? Where is He? And when it hurts the most, we beg for His deliverance. We struggle to open our hands and our hearts to Him even as we question His presence and purposes in this place. We cry out for Him to show us what He intends for our lives.
And then we are challenged to ask:
What if, instead of pleading His intervention, we acknowledge His presence and thank Him for these crucible moments? What if, instead of asking Him to deliver us from this place, we ask Him to deliver us in this place?
None of us knows the answer, but it is clear He has given us each other to lean in on and walk with. Our tears and prayers and questions spill together. We can each find a reason we don't quite belong, but we know all the same that He brought us together for a purpose that as of now, remains hidden in Him.
This is us, walking through it together. This is us, sojourning through a land where the line between faith and crazy is sometimes imperceptible. Reach out in the dark, and you will find the hand of a friend.
Sometimes we stand and wait, trusting that our seeming stillness somehow amounts to best honoring and serving our King. And sometimes we have the chance to open our windows so everyone can see and to say: Even if He does not show up, I will not bend my knee to another.
Dedicated to the glory of God and for the purposes of His kingdom.
Sarah, Christianne, Christin, and Kirsten
For different reasons, we're all in the crucible. We're walking through a season of intensive refinement, punctuated with celebrations and miracles. We wonder and ask, what is God doing? Where is He? And when it hurts the most, we beg for His deliverance. We struggle to open our hands and our hearts to Him even as we question His presence and purposes in this place. We cry out for Him to show us what He intends for our lives.
And then we are challenged to ask:
What if, instead of pleading His intervention, we acknowledge His presence and thank Him for these crucible moments? What if, instead of asking Him to deliver us from this place, we ask Him to deliver us in this place?
None of us knows the answer, but it is clear He has given us each other to lean in on and walk with. Our tears and prayers and questions spill together. We can each find a reason we don't quite belong, but we know all the same that He brought us together for a purpose that as of now, remains hidden in Him.
This is us, walking through it together. This is us, sojourning through a land where the line between faith and crazy is sometimes imperceptible. Reach out in the dark, and you will find the hand of a friend.
Sometimes we stand and wait, trusting that our seeming stillness somehow amounts to best honoring and serving our King. And sometimes we have the chance to open our windows so everyone can see and to say: Even if He does not show up, I will not bend my knee to another.
Dedicated to the glory of God and for the purposes of His kingdom.
Sarah, Christianne, Christin, and Kirsten
16 comments:
sarah, WOW. i hardly know where to start. this is just plain powerful.
how amazing is it that your pastor should be preaching from the same passage of daniel?!
i've been thinking a lot about this victory that comes through standing, too. i think sometimes we're so (pardon the somewhat-inappropriate pun) hellbent on making progress, making it down the path, that we forget that God is more concerned about who we are than what we do. and in the face of such opposition, standing is A LOT. it's so hard: we want to write, we want to minister, we want to reach a lot of people in His name: we want to make progress on our respective paths. and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. maybe standing is about God fashioning us into the people through whom He can do those things.
you make such a great observation about how when shadrach, meshach, & abednego stood they were acknowledging God's rightful place. even when the flames were an imminent threat, they stood in acknolwedgement of God as God in defiance of the temptation the enemy offered to bow down and save their own skins, they stood. maybe God would save them and maybe not. talk about ruthless trust!!
i think i always had a problem with the standing before because it seemed to imply passivity (am i burying my talent? i'm not doing anything for God!). but really it's not, is it? standing is resisting our enemy. standing is pressing our full weight into God & His promises even when all the empirical evidence says it's ridiculous. standing is forfeiting our "right" to save our own skins and trust God to hold us in the place we stand. standing takes strength when so much is pressing against you. standing is trusting God for the victory: there is no question to whom the victory should be ascribed.
p.s. there's no doubt that the glory goes to God for any victory against the enemy when we stand. but we do have a choice in the matter: we can stand (resist the enemy), or we can cower (give in to the enemy).
but i have a thought: maybe part of what happens in the standing is that we give God permission to burn away those pieces of us that are not like Him, and in so doing, we get to see Him in a new way.
i dunno ... i tend to process things externally so that's what i'm doing here.
discuss amongst yourselves ...
:o)
Wow.
Not a lot more than that.
Just wow.
I love how you said sometimes we do it for him and sometimes we do it with him. That's powerful. Sometimes the enemy's assaults come to undermine our faith in God, in which we choose to stand for him. Sometimes the attacks come against us directly, in which we stand with him and he holds us up.
That's pretty crazy that your pastor spoke on that exact same passage. You made me smile when you said sometimes God repeats himself when he wants you to really get something. :)
Interesting, these thoughts about standing we've all been having. In the last couple days, the image in my mind has been shifting to one of kneeling . . . but kneeling before God, not the other gods. I guess it feels like surrender God's about in me right now.
PS: Kirsten, I'm with you on the thought that God is burning away pieces of ourselves that are not like him, which allow us to see him in a new way once we emerge from the fire. I just finished reading a section of Mulholland's book Invitation to a Journey in which he talks about the work of spiritual formation being about the continual conforming of us into the likeness of Christ . . . but that the only way God can conform us into the likeness of Christ is to come to those places inside us that are not like Christ. In fact, he says that this is the true meaning of taking up our cross daily . . . this is the true death to self. Thank God we are not alone in this work! Our role is to be submitted to the purifying of God over us; God's role is to do the actual purifying.
Wow...somehow, I missed all of these comments...I think I forgot to subscribe to them...silly me. But actually it's so good to come over and find them all. I'm a little tired and a little lonely this morning and it's good to fine you all here (I almost put "here," but resisted the inappropriate use of quotation marks...just so you know).
Kirsten--"ruthless trust" is right. I read that book just a little while ago, though I should go back and read it again. I wonder if S, M, and A could trust because they knew that the victory was in their standing, not in what happened afterward. When I look at the passage, it seems like, by the time the king gets to them, they already know they've won. And I definitely think they chose that and deserve credit for standing up. I can't imagine being the only people standing and being surrounded by bow-ers.
I think there's something to the idea of standing as allowing God to burn away the parts that aren't like him. Standing seems...submissive, at least sometimes, like saying, "Lord, if this is where you will me to stand, then I'll stand here." And that totally allows us to have something burned away--particularly the parts that would prefer to stand somewhere else. Or run. Or cower.
Christianne--I couldn't tell from your comment if you're feeling missed with all the discussion of standing or if you're just wanting to let us know that the image has morphed, for you, into something different with a different call. I want you to know that I see you, kneeling and opening your hands to let God do as he wills with your dreams and passions and...well, your life. I see it, and it's beautiful.
And I'm with you on the "thank God we're not alone in this." I know I couldn't purify myself!! It's so hard. I'm so glad that God takes that burden.
Oh, you're sweet, girl. I'm not feeling missed at all . . . just wanting to share what images feel most strong for me right now. In some way, I feel like the kneeling could also be a kind of standing . . . standing for submission, maybe? If that makes any sense. :)
Hey, guess what. There's a way that you can automatically get e-mail notifications for all the comments on this blog without having to subscribe each time or subscribe via Google Reader from the main page. Here's how.
On the Blogger dashboard, where you go to compose new posts, select the Settings function for this blog. Then, under the Comments tab, scroll down to the bottom. You can put in your e-mail address for comment notifications to be sent whenever a comment is made on any of the posts. Cool, huh?
I'm so glad you're not feeling missed. Like I said, I couldn't tell...blog comments not being the most expressive things in the world.
You know, when you first talked about kneeling I thought something about it being like standing. I can't quite grasp it, but I think you're onto something.
And you're a genius about the comments, BTW. ;)
now i'm just going to sound like a copy cat, but i just wanted to say (and maybe i was starting to get at this in my first discombobulated comment) that i had that thought too: that kneeling and standing are the same somehow -- surrendering to God. resisting and defying the enemy. worshipping God. trusting Him to supply our needs in that place. giving up our rights to ourselves.
yes, i think standing and kneeling are maybe the same attitude with a different posture of the heart.
Kirsten, I love how you put that!! So cool that we've all been having the same intimations about it being the same thing in a way. This is one brilliantly cool community, eh? :)
we are rather fabluous, aren't we?
:o)
Rather.
Aw, shucks...completely! Totally and completely!
Ok, my pastor here in Los Angeles, just preached the same thing not a month ago and God has been making it resonate in my heart ever since. The fact that I would curiously wonder on to this blog (thanks to Kirsten:) and read this is no coincidence either. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This was so encouraging and really quite profound. You are right, God tells us over and over again what He is trying to help us understand.
Hi Jason, and you're welcome. It sounds like God has you in a good place.
So I'm not a poster on this blog, but I was reminded of it last night at bible study, when the leader read the verse that they would obey God "even if" he didn't rescue them. I read your words, and they fill my heart. Thank you for making this a place for people to come and hear/know God, and how he is real. Life can sometimes downright suck, but he is truly faithful, and I need to remind myself of that.
ilse, i'm so glad you're here. there are four of us posting here, but this space is truly for everyone who wants to be a part of it. and you are!! you are a part of this.
love you, friend. thanks for stopping by.
Post a Comment